America’s Customer Festival 2015: LIVE FROM THE EVENT- segmentation and personalization

Cornelius Kaestner, Vice President, Applied Predictive Technologies and Tony Harris, President, Thorntons Inc. gave a great presentation on harnessing the power of data to drive your loyalty engine.

Previously in 2012 and 2013, Thorntons did not see a need for a loyalty program. They were a bit late in the game. Their competitors started implementing programs as they saw their customer retention drop and they felt it was a time to change along with the industry. The first point to touch for them was how to leverage the emotional nature of fuel purchases. Thorntons also created a loyalty program that minimized “forever” benefits where loyal customers were able to save by receiving the “24 hour rule”- getting the lowest fuel price within the 24 hours they purchase.

APT has played a big part in Thorntons loyalty program by analyzing tests at store, customer, and transaction levels. They were able to introduce refreshing rewards in a subset of markets by understanding incremental impact of this rewards program through APT’s Test & Learn Software. To this day, they still use APT to grow and enhance their loyalty programs.

Thorntons continues to focus on key questions about loyalty initiatives and with that, loyalty is growing more integral to any company’s success.

Eric Smuda, VP of Customer Insights and Experience, AVIS Budget gave a compelling presentation on increasing retention through personalization. Biggest question: how do we get our customers engaged and drive profitability?

Avis Rental Car has an evolving segmentation model. It includes:

Saavy- “Good price”

Value- “Value for the money”

Experience- “Simplicity and ease”

Premium- “The good life”

Their tactic is to take each customer segment and experiment each with offers. With A/B testing, they were able to come up with a control group and learned a lot from their email campaign performances. They learned how to better identify who was in what segment. Being able to understand each customer within their segments allows you to grow your campaign performance.

The last presentation of the loyalty stream was Tom Barton, Product Marketing Manager, Klein Tools on multichanneling the rewards experience to implement a device-agnostic program.

Not all brands and manufacturers have loyalty programs and for Klein Tools, it was a challenge to start one without having anything to work off of in the past. The problem was that Klein Tools don’t sell direct to end users; only through distribution.

They’ve come up with a theory of mobile receipt submission. They have developed the “SNIPP!” theory. Basically how it works is a customer buys a Klein Tools products from any distributor. They then scan their receipt and upload it. Once uploaded, they can redeem points for Klein Tools branded merchandise.

The trick of the loyalty program is to keep it transparent and keep it simple. Customers of Klein Tools can see and track their points and redemptions at all times. The simplicity is for every dollar spent, they get one point and it’s a tangible trade-off that customers can clearly understand.